At the ongoing Mars Conference hosted by Amazon, the company unveiled a new breed of robots for its distribution centres at the conference. The Mars Conference is an annual event, which Jeff Bezos hosts every year, inviting great inventors to the event. This year’s event kicked off on 4th June and is being hosted at Las Vegas.
The event, this time, is focussed on the robotic works that the company has been doing for the past few years. Brad Porter, the VP at Amazon Robotics, in his keynote, showcased newly designed robots to work along with the staff at the Amazon warehouses and distribution centres, in order to automate the sorting operations.
The latest robot, by the company, is an orange coloured compact sorting robot, named Pegasus drives, which will be joining the ranks of Amazon’s Kiva robots and will render a similar capacity. These robots will be part of Amazon’s new package sorting system. The robots are programmed to carry packages from one place to another within the warehouse, through various channels associated with predefined destinations.
The robots are attached to a conveyer belt, through which they stay on a specific path and move around the warehouse, making a highway-like view. The employees at the centre put the packages on the three feet wide tray on the top of the robot, and the robot takes the package to the specified destination.
The system will involve hundreds of such robots, that will automate the process of sorting and will reduce a lot of workload for the Amazon staff, increasing the accuracy, and the efficiency of the work. The company has already installed the sorting system with 800 robots at its Denver sorting centre, and according to Amazon, Pegasus drive has successfully cut down the sorting related complexity by 50%.
Amazon has said that over 2,00,000 robots are already working efficiently along with 3,00,000 of its employees at various sorting centres internationally. And now, it intends to expand its robotic unit with new Pegasus drives to reduce the workload for its employees. The company also claims that it has no intentions to replace its human manpower with robots. The robots are only to help their employees with their work. Moreover, the company is focussed on in-house production of the robots with its robot manufacturing arm, Kiva Systems, which Amazon had acquired in 2012.
Yashica is a Software Engineer turned Content Writer, who loves to write on social causes and expertise in writing technical stuff. She loves to watch movies and explore new places. She believes that you need to live once before you die. So experimenting with her life and career choices, she is trying to live her life to the fullest.